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Description
During my journey and research through the Underworld I was continually shocked by the unique niches and ecosystems that the underground world had to offer. One of the realizations that struck me was how the geography and structure of the Underworld itself affected life down below. Sure it may seem like an obvious observation, like how a mountain or canyon would affect a nearby ecosystem, but such things pale in comparison to what is down below. For us on the surface, life pretty much happens on the ground, and everything revolves around that. Mountains and ravines are essentially high and low ground. With the Underworld, though, there is more than just ground. Every ecosystem and land has walls and a ceiling now! Everything is enclosed, so the "sky" at some point has to stop. This doesn't just mean that these habitats are trapped in confined spaces, it rather means that life has more surface on which to thrive on! The walls and ceilings can host fungi and lichens, which in turn brings in hungry critters. More places to burrow, more places to roost. Habitats that extend upward and all around! Can you imagine looking up at a ceiling and seeing just as much life up there as there is on the floor? It is almost like another world, just one that is upside-down! There are a bunch of creatures in the Underworld that live in such places, finding a home atop the roof of their world! Up there, the Orthotite is one of the common species you will see up there. Or perhaps not see, depending on how closely you are looking!

The Orthotite is a cephalopod that has switched from living on the bottom of the ocean to the top of a cavern! While it does possess the famed tentacles that the rest of its kind has, some of them have changed quite a bit to adapt to this new environment. Rather than having eight or more flexible tendrils, the Orthotite has changed four of them into thicker, sturdier appendages. These limbs are short and stubby, with the bottom fanning out into a disc shape. These creatures have essentially turned these limbs into stout legs that end in one giant sucker! This is how the Orthotite clings to and travels across the ceiling, simply moving one leg at a time while the rest hang on! Besides these four trunk-like limbs, they have four long tentacles that end in thorny clamps. These are the "arms" of the creature, used to catch food and interact with things in its environment. They are surprisingly flexible and quite elastic, able to stretch and reach in any direction! When not in use, these tendrils can be retracted into its shell, the next feature of the Orthotite we are focusing on! This cephalopod species protects itself with a long sturdy shell, which makes up most of its body! This structure grows throughout their life, becoming larger and stronger with each passing year. The coloration and texture of their shell is designed to imitate the rocky world around them, making it look like a giant stalactite. By clamping down onto the ceiling and retracting their limbs, they can disguise themselves as a plain old stalactite, hiding from both predator and prey! While every Orthotite's shell grows in this stalactite shape, the random spurs and outgrowths are unique to each individual. By noting these extra growths and structures you could use them as an identifier of certain individuals within the population.

Life up high in this upside-down world still requires food, and the Orthotite has a particular taste. They are a carnivorous species that can feed on a multitude of small critters, but they prefer to feed on bats. Catching these agile creatures is quite difficult when they are flying, but the Orthotite targets them while they are in a more vulnerable state. Bats in the Underworld commonly roost on the ceiling of the caves and caverns, hanging up high as they groom and rest. This strategy protects them from predators on the ground, but those who dwell up high tend to find them quite in reach. The Orthotite captures its meal in a sneaky fashion. Hiding most of their body in their shell, they will slowly creep up to a place where bats commonly roost. If any prey moves or takes notice, they stop in their tracks and act like any old stalactite. Once in range, they hunker down and wait for the nearby bats to drop their guard. When they are distracted or sleeping, the Orthotite will slowly extend its tentacles, each one reaching for a different target. They will silently slither across the ceiling, moving like snakes that are ready to strike. If they are undetected, the tentacles will snap forward and seize their prey in a spiny grip. The captured prey will be pulled back to the hungry body and eaten. If one of the targets is alerted and tries to flee, its other tentacles serve as backup. The panicked flight from the spotted appendage can often cause one of the other bats to fly in range of another arm, so perhaps the hunt won't be wasted after all! When feeding, the Orthotite will use its facial tendrils to hold its meal while its beaked mouth munches on its prize. These same tendrils are sensitive to taste and smell, and they use them to track down bat roosts as they roam about up above.

For the denizens of the Underworld, the Orthotite can be a rather overlooked species. What folk mainly know of them is their hunger for bats, and that can be a good or bad thing depending on if they want more or less bats in the area. For those who wish to harvest guano for growing crops, Orthotites can be pests that scare away productive roosts. For folk who wish that the enriching guano didn't land on their homes and heads, the Orthotite is a blessing. Their populations are strongest in caverns that possess cities and towns, as they help curb the local bats. Outside of that, no one really cares too much about them. I imagine this feeling is because the Orthotites are high above and quite inaccessible. Unless you are scaling the cavern walls or crossing the suspended walkways high above, you won't really see much of them. They spend their entire lives on the ceiling, so much so that there was a popular myth that Orthotites were incapable of living right-side up! It was believed that their organs and anatomy was so highly specialized to hanging upside-down all their lives that if you turned them over, their bodies would fail and die. How bizarre! It has since been debunked, but I was quite curious about it myself! How would one react if placed on floor, out of its element? This was a test I never had the chance of performing, as getting my hands on a live Orthotite was quite difficult. Goodness, I had a hard enough time trying to observe them in their natural habitat!

I am a decent climber from all my travels, but I am not nearly good enough to scale Underworld terrain and hang from the ceiling at such a height! The only way I could observe them was to get access to one of their suspended walkways that hang up above their cities. Even then, I could only observe them through binoculars and telescope, as they roamed a distance away from these artificial paths. I didn't get a lot of time to watch them, as the network of paths I was on suddenly shook! I suspected one of Valac's pranks at first, but it turned out there was a construction team working on another part of the network. They were removing dangerous stalactites before they broke off and rained down on the citizens below, and during their work a collected chunk swung free and sent tremors through the whole network. For the demons and shades up there, it was nothing. As simple as a light breeze on a rope bridge. For me, it was terrifying. The whole path swung to and fro, and my mind finally realized how high up we were and how hard I would go splat if I fell. Imagine that! In the bowels of the earth and I get struck with a fear of heights! Odd as it was, it totally happened. In an instant I wanted to be anywhere else and desperately sought to have my roots on the earth again. I got so freaked out that I think Vespar practically carried me down from there. It was crazy! I have climbed mountains in pursuit of trolls and here I am losing my mind on a well-established, well-maintained catwalk! Incidents like that made me quite the target for teasing, and in that case I don't think I can blame them!

Chlora Myron
Dryad Natural Historian

-----------------------------------------------------------

More Underworld critters!

Description
During my journey and research through the Underworld I was continually shocked by the unique niches and ecosystems that the underground world had to offer. One of the realizations that struck me was how the geography and structure of the Underworld itself affected life down below. Sure it may seem like an obvious observation, like how a mountain or canyon would affect a nearby ecosystem, but such things pale in comparison to what is down below. For us on the surface, life pretty much happens on the ground, and everything revolves around that. Mountains and ravines are essentially high and low ground. With the Underworld, though, there is more than just ground. Every ecosystem and land has walls and a ceiling now! Everything is enclosed, so the "sky" at some point has to stop. This doesn't just mean that these habitats are trapped in confined spaces, it rather means that life has more surface on which to thrive on! The walls and ceilings can host fungi and lichens, which in turn brings in hungry critters. More places to burrow, more places to roost. Habitats that extend upward and all around! Can you imagine looking up at a ceiling and seeing just as much life up there as there is on the floor? It is almost like another world, just one that is upside-down! There are a bunch of creatures in the Underworld that live in such places, finding a home atop the roof of their world! Up there, the Orthotite is one of the common species you will see up there. Or perhaps not see, depending on how closely you are looking!

The Orthotite is a cephalopod that has switched from living on the bottom of the ocean to the top of a cavern! While it does possess the famed tentacles that the rest of its kind has, some of them have changed quite a bit to adapt to this new environment. Rather than having eight or more flexible tendrils, the Orthotite has changed four of them into thicker, sturdier appendages. These limbs are short and stubby, with the bottom fanning out into a disc shape. These creatures have essentially turned these limbs into stout legs that end in one giant sucker! This is how the Orthotite clings to and travels across the ceiling, simply moving one leg at a time while the rest hang on! Besides these four trunk-like limbs, they have four long tentacles that end in thorny clamps. These are the "arms" of the creature, used to catch food and interact with things in its environment. They are surprisingly flexible and quite elastic, able to stretch and reach in any direction! When not in use, these tendrils can be retracted into its shell, the next feature of the Orthotite we are focusing on! This cephalopod species protects itself with a long sturdy shell, which makes up most of its body! This structure grows throughout their life, becoming larger and stronger with each passing year. The coloration and texture of their shell is designed to imitate the rocky world around them, making it look like a giant stalactite. By clamping down onto the ceiling and retracting their limbs, they can disguise themselves as a plain old stalactite, hiding from both predator and prey! While every Orthotite's shell grows in this stalactite shape, the random spurs and outgrowths are unique to each individual. By noting these extra growths and structures you could use them as an identifier of certain individuals within the population.

Life up high in this upside-down world still requires food, and the Orthotite has a particular taste. They are a carnivorous species that can feed on a multitude of small critters, but they prefer to feed on bats. Catching these agile creatures is quite difficult when they are flying, but the Orthotite targets them while they are in a more vulnerable state. Bats in the Underworld commonly roost on the ceiling of the caves and caverns, hanging up high as they groom and rest. This strategy protects them from predators on the ground, but those who dwell up high tend to find them quite in reach. The Orthotite captures its meal in a sneaky fashion. Hiding most of their body in their shell, they will slowly creep up to a place where bats commonly roost. If any prey moves or takes notice, they stop in their tracks and act like any old stalactite. Once in range, they hunker down and wait for the nearby bats to drop their guard. When they are distracted or sleeping, the Orthotite will slowly extend its tentacles, each one reaching for a different target. They will silently slither across the ceiling, moving like snakes that are ready to strike. If they are undetected, the tentacles will snap forward and seize their prey in a spiny grip. The captured prey will be pulled back to the hungry body and eaten. If one of the targets is alerted and tries to flee, its other tentacles serve as backup. The panicked flight from the spotted appendage can often cause one of the other bats to fly in range of another arm, so perhaps the hunt won't be wasted after all! When feeding, the Orthotite will use its facial tendrils to hold its meal while its beaked mouth munches on its prize. These same tendrils are sensitive to taste and smell, and they use them to track down bat roosts as they roam about up above.

For the denizens of the Underworld, the Orthotite can be a rather overlooked species. What folk mainly know of them is their hunger for bats, and that can be a good or bad thing depending on if they want more or less bats in the area. For those who wish to harvest guano for growing crops, Orthotites can be pests that scare away productive roosts. For folk who wish that the enriching guano didn't land on their homes and heads, the Orthotite is a blessing. Their populations are strongest in caverns that possess cities and towns, as they help curb the local bats. Outside of that, no one really cares too much about them. I imagine this feeling is because the Orthotites are high above and quite inaccessible. Unless you are scaling the cavern walls or crossing the suspended walkways high above, you won't really see much of them. They spend their entire lives on the ceiling, so much so that there was a popular myth that Orthotites were incapable of living right-side up! It was believed that their organs and anatomy was so highly specialized to hanging upside-down all their lives that if you turned them over, their bodies would fail and die. How bizarre! It has since been debunked, but I was quite curious about it myself! How would one react if placed on floor, out of its element? This was a test I never had the chance of performing, as getting my hands on a live Orthotite was quite difficult. Goodness, I had a hard enough time trying to observe them in their natural habitat!

I am a decent climber from all my travels, but I am not nearly good enough to scale Underworld terrain and hang from the ceiling at such a height! The only way I could observe them was to get access to one of their suspended walkways that hang up above their cities. Even then, I could only observe them through binoculars and telescope, as they roamed a distance away from these artificial paths. I didn't get a lot of time to watch them, as the network of paths I was on suddenly shook! I suspected one of Valac's pranks at first, but it turned out there was a construction team working on another part of the network. They were removing dangerous stalactites before they broke off and rained down on the citizens below, and during their work a collected chunk swung free and sent tremors through the whole network. For the demons and shades up there, it was nothing. As simple as a light breeze on a rope bridge. For me, it was terrifying. The whole path swung to and fro, and my mind finally realized how high up we were and how hard I would go splat if I fell. Imagine that! In the bowels of the earth and I get struck with a fear of heights! Odd as it was, it totally happened. In an instant I wanted to be anywhere else and desperately sought to have my roots on the earth again. I got so freaked out that I think Vespar practically carried me down from there. It was crazy! I have climbed mountains in pursuit of trolls and here I am losing my mind on a well-established, well-maintained catwalk! Incidents like that made me quite the target for teasing, and in that case I don't think I can blame them!

Chlora Myron
Dryad Natural Historian

-----------------------------------------------------------

More Underworld critters!